Mon, 31 Oct 2011

My new netbook (about which, more later) has a trackpad with
areas set aside for both vertical and horizontal scrolling.
Vertical scrolling worked out of the box on Squeeze without needing
any extra fiddling. My old Vaio had that too, and I loved it.

Horizontal scrolling took some extra research.
I was able to turn it on with a command:

synclient HorizEdgeScroll=1

(thank you, AbsolutelyTech).
Then it worked fine, for the duration of that session.

But it took a lot more searching to find out the right place to set
it permanently. Nearly every page you find on trackpad settings tells
you to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Distros haven't normally
used xorg.conf in over three years! Sure, you can generate
one, then edit it -- but surely there's a better way.

And there is. At least in Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Natty, you can edit
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
and add this options line inside the "InputClass" section:

options "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"

Don't forget the quotes, or X won't even start.

In theory, you can use this for any of the Synaptics driver options --
tap rate and sensitivity, even multitouch. Your mileage may vary --
horizontal scroll is the only one I've tested so far. But at least
it's easier than generating and maintaining an xorg.conf file!